R J Lupin
by Elixia
Summary: Remus writes a journal... Major OOTP Spoilers!


Well, what can I tell you? I'm thirty-seven years old and I have lost everyone that I have ever loved. I'm not married, I am unemployed and ninety-nine percent of the wizarding population would prefer to see me skinned, dead and hanging from a Ministry wall. I am a werewolf; a four legged beast with fur, yellow eyes and a wrinkled snout. When I am normal, I have a light shade of hair that is greying and wry, grey eyes. I am six feet and one inch in height and I am very thin like a tall rake. That's all I am. That's all I ever will be: a wasted, average looking man with an extraordinary illness.  
  
I live in a small house, as one might expect, and am currently made redundant. Every mug I own has a chink at the mouth and the tidy, neat front I abide by ceases from the moment you step in the front door. Newspapers lay scattered and torn from seat to fraying seat and in the sink a pile of kitchen utensils are waiting to be washed. The cupboard doors are leaning off their hinges and the bins are unemptied, used food cartons and packaging clutter up the floor. When you've lost your best friend somehow housework seems less important.  
  
I smile at people, even when they hate me. I always say 'please' and 'thank you' and my courtesy is always emaculate. I fear rejection most, even though I have been rejected precisely eighty-five times in my existence, not including the schools that refused to take me as an eleven year old. My clothes and my appearance have been insulted precisely one thousand five hundred times and I have been leered, sneered and jeered at many more. I should have grown used to it now. Yet, sometimes, it still hurts.  
  
Sirius Black, my best friend (who was once my greatest enemy, who before then was one of my closest friends) was killed a couple of weeks ago. If I told him he would die by falling through a curtain he would have threatened to hex me for being intolerably stupid. Yet that was how his bright presence was extinguished, through a haunting veil that seperated life and death. There was fear on his face before he fell: a twisted, contorted, horrified fear that I see in the strangest of places.  
  
Harry was saved. That is the third time that one of my friends has sacrificed their lives to save him. I must honour him like everyone else. I do like the boy. He's bright and clever, just like his father and has gone through far more pain than I have in the first fifteen years of his life. I just wish his father and godfather hadn't been my closest friends. That's all, but I suppose that makes me selfish.  
  
Dumbledore tells me to write this because I haven't been sleeping or eating, somehow believing this will do me more good than a sleeping draught or what have you. Somehow endulging in the human senses seems wrong when all my friends are no longer here to enjoy them with me. Yet I have been through this before when I was twenty-two and I discovered Voldemort gone and James and Lily dead. I thought I lost everyone back then too. I should have learned then never to get attached to anybody from then on. Then Sirius came back, a beloved relic from the past, which although beaten, ripped and a little broken from being stored in Azkaban too long, I couldn't help but love and accept and cherish. Perhaps my life was cursed; somehow the moon was controlling my destiny beyond just once a month. Perhaps it was just bad luck, similar to the same night I wandered too far out, too late, in the fields as a fool-hardy nine year old where a werewolf was waiting to attack me. Perhaps it was just bad luck that I survived.  
  
I moved back from Grimmauld Place two days after Sirius died. I still have to commute there each week for Order meetings, but I can't stand that place without Sirius. His contempt is marked all over it from the slashed portraits to the ripped curtains. Everyone continues to go on as if it had never taken place; that the Department of Mysteries had been some great, exciting adventure where only one was brought down but far many more Death Eaters captured. In technical terms, it had been a success.  
  
I only have Harry left, and yet, what can an old man like me do for him? He has lost his parents, he has lost his godfather and I am the last person he would be thinking about. No, I am alone and perhaps I deserve everything that has happened to me.  
  
I should probably make the effort to eat a hearty meal and appease Molly's protests at my eating habits. I don't really want to talk to anybody or bear the company of other Order Members, but I must go on. I must survive. How many more times will I have to grieve and re-greive from here on? I'm ageing, I'm weakening and I don't know how much more I can take of this.  
  
I think I am on the verge of a nervous break down.  
  
- R. J. Lupin.  
  
____________________  
  
Disclaimer's Notice: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. 


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